"I don't really take it off, so I don't notice it," Watson told the MetroWest Daily News. "And then I noticed it was gone."

After swimming at Centennial Beach a couple weeks ago, the Marlborough resident had already returned home when he discovered the titanium band was missing.

"I thought it was around the house," said his wife, Shannon.

Instead, Watson deduced it was at the bottom of Fort Meadow Reservoir, where he immediately set off to retrieve it. But swimming down with just a pair of goggles wasn't working, he said, adding that because of the abundance of shells the bottom "literally turned into a blur - everything was shiny."

Unfortunately for the Watsons, the ring is still down there now. But not for lack of effort, after Jim Nannery, president of the MetroWest Dive Club, probed the murky depths of the reservoir in his scuba gear on Saturday afternoon.

Watson had contacted the club, which meets once a month in Natick, on a whim this past week, offering members $100 to find the lost band.

"Within five hours, Jim calls me," he said. "I was shocked - I really thought it was a shot in the dark."

"My heart felt for him - it was his wedding band, and they were recently married," Nannery said. "I said, 'Let's not worry about money - let's find the ring.'"

After making arrangements with the town and other authorities on Friday night, Nannery, also of Marlborough, arrived at Centennial Beach just after noon on Saturday with his scuba equipment and underwater metal detector. Immediately, the search was complicated when they discovered the dock Watson had been swimming around had already been removed, forcing Watson to estimate where he had been.

As Nannery, an experienced diver, circled around a few dozen yards offshore, the Watsons agreed the ring wasn't irreplaceable. But they would regret losing something that carried so much sentimental value.

"I know we could get another ring, but it's not the one we got married with," Shannon said, adding, "I didn't know it would bother (Aaron) as much as it did."

"If he finds it, I'm going to engrave it - put a phone number on there, put a 'If found, return to,'" he joked.

After about an hour and a half, however, Nannery had come up empty, although Watson said the diver volunteered to come back with the club to look again during the colder months when all the weeds at the bottom are dead.

"He did find a lot of other things out there," Watson said, including a bracelet that had "love" etched on it.

While the couple, who celebrate their one-year anniversary on Sept. 8, are holding out hope, Watson added he may have to break down and buy a new band.

Lawyers for the Boston Marathon bomber prepared to rest their case Tuesday after an FBI fingerprint examiner testified that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's fingerprints weren't found on any of the marathon bomb components, but his older brother's were.